It is the most prized literary award of all, an accolade that honours a writer's entire body of work and pits all living fiction authors published in the English language against each other.

The 13-strong shortlist for the Man Booker International prize has been announced. Limbering up in the race for the award, known in the publishing world as "the Olympics of literature", are authors as diverse as Philip Roth, Philip Pullman, Anne Tyler and John le Carré .

Rick Gekoski, chair of the judging panel for the £60,000 prize, declared himself undaunted by the task of comparing Roth and Pullman.

Gekoski said it was entirely reasonable to compare authors such as the Man Asia award-winning writer, Su Tong, whose works examine the modern transformations of Chinese society, with Tyler, whose subtle evocations of Baltimore and family life have won her the Pulitzer prize.

The shortlist, he said, has been assembled with no regard to an overarching theory of literary merit. Instead, he said, his key criteria is simple: "It has always been pleasure."

Gekoski said that he and fellow judges Carmen Callil and Justin Cartwright had based their decisions not on any preconceived criteria but on personal tastes honed through "a hell of a lot of practice" of reading.

"You read all of them in depth, then you talk a lot, then you think, and read some more. Then you decide which one you wish to honour, and why," he said. "It is a question of slow comparison and contrast, and a winner eventually emerges."

While Gekoski conceded that "no writer is great all the time", the Scottish writer James Kelman may be hoping for a happier Booker experience than that which surrounded the 1989 triumph of his novel How Late It Was, How Late.

His victory was greeted with a storm of protest over his liberal use of the word fuck, estimated by one critic to appear 4,000 times within the course of the 400-page novel, which he later suggested harmed his reputation and sales, leaving him facing questions from readers about "sweary words" 20 years after the award.

Kelman is joined on the shortlist by Marilynne Robinson, whose three novels and three collections of essays are a study in refined precision, and Spanish poet, novelist and essayist Juan Goytisolo, whose novels alone number more than 20.

Also in the running are the Australian writer David Malouf, and the Indian Canadian novelist Rohinton Mistry, while the Chinese novelist Wang Anyi, the Goncourt prize-winning Lebanese author Amin Maalouf and the Italian playwright Dacia Maraini complete the shortlist.

• The winner will be announced at the Sydney Writers' festival on 18 May.

• This article was amended on 30 March and 4 April 2011. Due to an editing error it said the Booker prize was for authors writing in English. The Booker is for authors published in English regardless of their work's original language. The byline has also been corrected.